As someone who recently had some admin work to do on a Cobalt RaQ3 I can only testify to the bone headedness of SUN's Linux efforts. I have the following points to make about SUN in relation to their so called Linux efforts:
It is nigh on impossible to get updates for third party packages (.pkg's) for older Cobalt machines. Cobalt had the brilliant idea of making a web browser based admin interface, thereby supposedly making it easy for newbies to administer the machine. This has the tangential effect of making the machines vulnerable to cracking (like IIS) because the admins have no idea of what they're doing and what they should be updating. Turning the machines over to someone who knows what bash is doesn't help immediately because installing software from the commandline is difficult as the whole system has been modified by SUN to make it difficult to get those CLI installs reflected in the web interface.
The news groups and online Cobalt boards of full of irate users asking for help, and , more importantly, not getting much from SUN. Almost all help is from other users. It took me almost three days of constant searching to find SUN documentation on how to roll my own.pkg installer. Considering that the system is based on the RPM system one does wonder why they didn't go a more compatible route.
I needed a PHP update and a custom Webalizer in German. The PHP "make install" exited with an APXS error and after about a week someone told me that the Cobalt APXS script is buggy and outdated, after which I managed to do the install by hand. The Webalizer compilation was less error prone but the fact that I had to do it and the PHP installation by hand because there were no packages available says legions about SUN's commitment to the platform.
To get help from SUN you have to pay, and considering that you already payed for the machine and ISP costs etc, it is a slap in the face.
The experience was frustrating and only strangthened my conviction that SUN has almost no idea of what consumers and smaller operators want, and possibly that SUN will go out of the market because of this if they carry on in this manner.
Resistant bacteria and virii form in hospital environments where every precaution is taken to ensure sterility. These are the hardy survivors of attempts to kill them with disinfectants etc. They (NASA) do have a point, even if very remote that if there is some form of (possibly dormant) life on Mars that it will be extremely hardy and resistant considering that they would have survived billions of years in a near vacuum and high UV radiation environment. I think the chance that these theoretical bacteria or virii being compatible with humans is extremely small, but possible. Considering that lately there has been evidence of both water and possible life (the/. article on the green images seen on photos) perhaps even caused by earth bacteria contamination by the Viking landers and Mars Rover, there is good reason to take at least some precautions.
Go there and take a look at least. It's a java gamin g site on the basis of applets. Register (horror!) and take a look at the games. There are two 3D games last time I looked and a host of single and multiplayer tetris, galaxis and backgammon knockoffs etc.
This site is very interesting for a number of reasons:
1.It is immensely popular. When you play a game a window of all the other users online at the time pops up, and it blew me over to be honest. 2.The games look extremely good visually, are based on simple premises that make them adictive and are playable even on slower hardware. 3.It works best in Explorer's MS JVM of all things. JDK1.2 Browsers are not supported well and don't even work in some cases. This raises the question as to where they will go now that MS has dropped having it's own JVM in XP?
Go here and see what you can do with a well written ava 3D engine that needs no hardware acceleration. Take note of the site design. It makes an impression on consumers.
I know this. But this is exactly the same response SUN has always given. Please, I know that for instance creating multiple text fields together to form a table bogs down the system,but why didn't they just *make a table element*? Swing is fine on todays fast machines, but at that crucial time SUN made Swing practically useless for client application development and the ball slipped out of their hands.
They never looked at what the consumers were using or what the consumers wanted. I suspect that this is a legacy of SUN's involvement with the high end server market where they just don't have teams that analyse what the consumers want. MS does or at least seems to do so.
The question raised by Linux users (why no QT for Linx?) is a good one.
I'm not trolling but perhaps it reflects marketshare and perhaps is a byproduct of the whole OSS movement. The general mindset is that Linux is difficult to use (which is crap but bare with me). Have the OSS crowd ever asked themselves what the platform looks like to an outsider, especially an outsider consumer. Two (2) major rival Desktop systems (KDE and GNOME), no coherent approach to usability and the occaisional need to go and do something on the commandline (I know it has improved but it is still neccessary for some things). I remember even Linus saying last year that it was time the something was done about the usability. Think of how it looks to a potential commercial developer such as Macromedia or Adobe. Which Windowing system do they use, KDE or GNOME? How do they make it completely uniform enough in order to make it worthwhile? This is not a shot at OSS but while OSS software can survive (well sometimes) in an environment like this, commercial stuff like the above can't.
While I think both Desktop systems have their merits, IMO it would be beneficial if they were to merge as I think the fragmentation hurts the platform as a target for commercial software.
This is the thrust of apple's suite. Although it entails the overhead of making a Flash movie for every video you watch online, you suddenly have much more flexibilty in the content and a player that just about everyone has, or will have sooner or later. This means that a major tool of Apple's branding is no longer interesting.
However, Apple is just as dumb as could have been with this whole QT thing. While QT supposedly has the ability to play Flash movies in QT tracks it has never been uptodate with the latest flash version nor has apple ever provided an inhouse tool to produce interactive content (unless this is also the product of some fucked deal between Apple and macromedia). The only company that makes such a tool, Totallyhip (www.totally.com), has been struggling for years to get any marketing presence (who knows it exists?) and, although the tool was far more flexible and powerful than Flash in the beginning, Flash has long since overtaken it.
Every interview I read on James Gossling, I read "how people are doing all sorts of exiting things on the desktop with it" and some other stuff such as how it is getting into "the embedded space". (what is embedded space? Did an astronaut get some vacum in abottle and bring it back with him?).
At the same time I read how SUN marvelousy manages to fuck things up with respect to their favourite language on the client side. Granted, it is huge on the e-commerce side of things, but things like JSP are too complex for simple backend applications that are far more easily handled in PHP or ASP. The mobile market seems to like it and it might become big there too, given that ARM and others are making processor core that handle bytecode natively, but that's not yet a given. What stresses me is that, from the beginning, SUN mishandled Java and played into MS' hands for a number of reasons: 1.When it first came out it became very popular very quickly because of it's ability to provide pixelated aliased dancing Dukes and and sound to web pages. However Sun never bothered to push the point and try to improve performance and load times. People got very tired of seeing pixelated images floating across the screen that took minutes in some cases to load on early modems. They just sat there on their butts and ignored the fact that AWT was hideous, ungainly, and in no way worked very well across platforms (I mean on the Mac or Unix for example) and lacked important controls. 2.One of the things that played into MS' hands was the above and the fact that SUN made Java native interaction very difficult or at least non-trivial to implement, so that people who would have otherwise been able to make GUI controls and interface in C/C++ were put off having to slog through JNI. Along came MS with their JRI (or whatever it was called) which enabled all the hordes of MS developers to easily call MFC and other Win32 stuff directly from the classes. It was an easy picking and whose fault was it. It was or should have been obvious that MS would try to scupper anything that anyone else did (Custom ActiveX never became very popular but it did serve the purpose of making more FUD enter the arena) and the need for easy native access was defintely there. I know that it might have neccesitated changes in the security model but SUN didn't listen or was too confident or just too plain stupid when you look at the ugliness of their desktop for example. 3.Eventually they did listen and came up with Swing, which was so slow on machines of the time (ever run the Swing demo stuff on a 223MHz x86?) that it put off many companies and developers, who just carried on using VB because it was a no contest in terms of GUI response. And this although Swing looked very good.
Why did SUN ignore all the compaints? Why did they make native access so difficult? Why didn't they just improve AWT? Why didn't they try to look at it from a consumer point of view, which is what all those people watching the moronic applets of time were. Applets have all but dissapeared on the web and 99% of interactive shit is done with Flash today. Why didn't they try a trick from the MS book and try to implement things like the JVM starting up on boot or browser launch to make Applets start faster? Why did SUN make such a huge fuss of MS ignoring Java in XP when they couldn't even be bothered to make a marketing push for, IMO, some pretty neat stuff like WebStart?(who actually uses this?)
MS may be an abuse monopoly but SUN has it's head in the clouds up with the bosses of big banks etc and seems too dumb to try to see things from a consumer point of view.
ARM's jazelle core and others (do a google search or go to SUN's website) do this and supposedly it is already being implemented by mobile phone makers.
I've come to respect the/. system of open moderation and I ask myself why these trolls are still at 0?
As for *BSD, from what I gather OpenBSD is still the only OS that can claim no remote vulnerabilities with the standard distro over four years. If there was ever a reason to use it as a firewall/gateway/router this should be it. I don't know much about FreeBSD and NetBSD except for Theo de Raadt's rant's about IP, but I like the OpenBSD attitude: They don't seem to see themselves in competition with any OS, they take their time to review the code and release a solid OS. On top of this they have a definite plus in terms of not being developed in the US and therefore not being subject to US export restrictions.
I'm pretty paranoid about most things MS does, perhaps because of their record of back stabbing and this is no exception. In another article on one of MS' VPs in the court talking about how allowing competitors access to the desktop is not in MS' interests because "they might boot Linux" and in conjunction with the article on how MS wants the BIOS to be flashable from Windows itself, I suspect that MS has some trickery up it's sleeve. I really do suspect that MS is planning on releasing a future version of Windows or a SP that will actively prevent you from booting another OS on your PC and I think any "nice talk" from MS with respect to Linux is imply a means to an end.
Although I'm still skeptical about the success of hig tech PDA's in general, this has a couple of things that make it interesting for me: 1.Small size - the Nokias with the folding screen are slightly too big 2.Java - be nice to try out an self written app or two in a language that doesn't cost me the earth. 3.Camera - I think with i-mode now coming out in Europe and in the US as well I presume, the ability to send and receive images will be a hit 4.Colour - Maps, games, etc look better in colour 5.Practical case design 6.Nice OS - not owned by a certain company
I remember back when apple was doing very badly in 1996 there were rumours of an Apple Sony tie up. They are both competeing in the same niche - fancy comsumer high tech goods. Both are very good at what they do. Both are, in an industry that almost completely lack innovation (despite the claims of another certain large company), actually innovative. I sometimes wish that Apple could sometime do a deal with Sony to collaborate in product design and OS. Sadly, of course, this is never going to happen.
They are very good and need to be renewed in about 5 years. I can't lift heavy weights and have to be careful about not being too heavy. They cost about $4500 each and as I'm unemployed right now I don't know how I'm going to pay for the next lot.
This biotechnology crap is a two edged sword. It makes humans less able to adapt to the difficulties of real life, and it is only for the rich, as always.
Dear George and the good ol' boys probably took a look at the Chinese national firewall and thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we could have one of those too? Now, how are we gonna get this past the online-rights crowd?"
Here you pay that amount on your computer gear as well. I think it's worth it not to have potentially poisonous PC parts fucking up the environment. On the other hand I've been to a so called recycling place here and basically they just use the stuff for landfill anyway after grinding it up so we're screwed by the politicians yet once again.
If there is any company that is worse in terms of upgrades, stability problems, costs and user support than Quark (including, believe it or not Microsoft) I'ld like to hear it. The other posters here are dead on: The company has raped and abused it's monopoly in Prepress for years and doesn't care the slightest about customer opinion. However, Prepress houses and Printers have not helped at all because if there was ever a conservative, stuck_in_the_mud group of software users it's those people in Prepress. On the one hand they work in an industry that is already entrenched and has a set work flow and extremely tight deadlines to meet (worked there myself) and is thus unwilling to take the risks of trying out new processes that could entail stoppages in the process. On the other hand, this (and I've witnessed this myself) is a group that gets upset because InDesign has different keyboard shortcuts to XPress and then decides that InDesign is "too different" and switches back to XPress.
On top of this most editorial bureaus are stuck with that Pig of a software editorial system: CopyDesk, even though it is typical Quark slow, crashware. Adobe has an answer solution and hopefully this will stimulate the market somewhat.
I have my own beef with Quark as regards the mFactory mTropolis Multimedia Tool that Quark bought up in an attempt to get into that market when their own useless POS, XPress_coupled Immedia didn't get anywhere. They provided no marketing, no support and no development of the tool which then consequently and unsurprisingly didn't expand it's user base. The brilliance of mTropolis can not be overstated in that, even now, 5 years after Quark killed it, there is an *expanding* user group on yahoo groups.
After Quark killed the tool, the user base tried various methods to get the source or at least a development licence from Quark to no avail. Apart from the one million dollar price tag that Quark put on the dead code (which the user group could obviously not afford) they stipulated that "all negative comments pertaining to Quark" must cease before they would think about it because there was such an outcry.
I'm not sure what most European schools use as their OS's but I suppose it would be some version of Windows. Here in Switzerland, although there is a techie elite that is very comfortable with Linux and OSS, it's the case that most people and companies are MS users and have this unfounded feeling that it is the "superior" solution and scoff at suggestions that OSS will bring them anything. the thing is that Switzerland is on the whole a very rich country where the average wage is about $3500/month for the whole country and so most customers (as well as schools) are not inconvenienced by high MS software licences. MS spends a lot of propaganda PR money here to make sure that it stays that way (Product rollouts TV adds etc). The only change that I have noticed is that almost all ISP's now use Linux and the two leading Tech Universities in Zürich and Lausanne have stopped their creep to Windows and have started moving back to a majority of Unix systems, since this is where the most room for development and experimentation is.
This will probably have an impact on the market sooner or later as most job ads for developers, managers etc require that the students graduated at one of these two Unis.
At the risk of being redundant I'll say this is a very good posting. I've also done tech support on the telephone (In no less than three languages) and the amount of people using computers who have absolutely no idea of what they are is amazing. Doing windows support was the worst for me because of the differences in Windows versions meaning that one has to first figure out what they are using and then *where* the various control dialogues are etc. Mac support has been the easiest both in OSX and Classic OS. What I did find interesting is that doing Linux support (although I am far from a guru in the OS) was easier than I expected. I was doing support for a guy running Linux on a cobalt RaQ and the great thing about Linux is that you can do most of the support through the command line once you get the guy to find the terminal (this is a similar process to windows i.e. "What's a terminal/console/taskbar etc") But once you're there you can do almost everything by simply asking the person to type in commands and read out the answers to you, which saves you a lot of hassle trying to figure out in which dialogue or control panel the user has just got lost in.
Of course if they ask "What's a keyboard?" then you have some more work cut out for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Sarcstic you are!
As someone who recently had some admin work to do on a Cobalt RaQ3 I can only testify to the bone headedness of SUN's Linux efforts. I have the following points to make about SUN in relation to their so called Linux efforts:
.pkg installer. Considering that the system is based on the RPM system one does wonder why they didn't go a more compatible route.
It is nigh on impossible to get updates for third party packages (.pkg's) for older Cobalt machines. Cobalt had the brilliant idea of making a web browser based admin interface, thereby supposedly making it easy for newbies to administer the machine. This has the tangential effect of making the machines vulnerable to cracking (like IIS) because the admins have no idea of what they're doing and what they should be updating. Turning the machines over to someone who knows what bash is doesn't help immediately because installing software from the commandline is difficult as the whole system has been modified by SUN to make it difficult to get those CLI installs reflected in the web interface.
The news groups and online Cobalt boards of full of irate users asking for help, and , more importantly, not getting much from SUN. Almost all help is from other users. It took me almost three days of constant searching to find SUN documentation on how to roll my own
I needed a PHP update and a custom Webalizer in German. The PHP "make install" exited with an APXS error and after about a week someone told me that the Cobalt APXS script is buggy and outdated, after which I managed to do the install by hand. The Webalizer compilation was less error prone but the fact that I had to do it and the PHP installation by hand because there were no packages available says legions about SUN's commitment to the platform.
To get help from SUN you have to pay, and considering that you already payed for the machine and ISP costs etc, it is a slap in the face.
The experience was frustrating and only strangthened my conviction that SUN has almost no idea of what consumers and smaller operators want, and possibly that SUN will go out of the market because of this if they carry on in this manner.
Resistant bacteria and virii form in hospital environments where every precaution is taken to ensure sterility. These are the hardy survivors of attempts to kill them with disinfectants etc. They (NASA) do have a point, even if very remote that if there is some form of (possibly dormant) life on Mars that it will be extremely hardy and resistant considering that they would have survived billions of years in a near vacuum and high UV radiation environment. I think the chance that these theoretical bacteria or virii being compatible with humans is extremely small, but possible. Considering that lately there has been evidence of both water and possible life (the /. article on the green images seen on photos) perhaps even caused by earth bacteria contamination by the Viking landers and Mars Rover, there is good reason to take at least some precautions.
minatrix.com
Go there and take a look at least. It's a java gamin g site on the basis of applets. Register (horror!) and take a look at the games. There are two 3D games last time I looked and a host of single and multiplayer tetris, galaxis and backgammon knockoffs etc.
This site is very interesting for a number of reasons:
1.It is immensely popular. When you play a game a window of all the other users online at the time pops up, and it blew me over to be honest.
2.The games look extremely good visually, are based on simple premises that make them adictive and are playable even on slower hardware.
3.It works best in Explorer's MS JVM of all things. JDK1.2 Browsers are not supported well and don't even work in some cases. This raises the question as to where they will go now that MS has dropped having it's own JVM in XP?
sumea
Go here and see what you can do with a well written ava 3D engine that needs no hardware acceleration. Take note of the site design. It makes an impression on consumers.
I know this. But this is exactly the same response SUN has always given. Please, I know that for instance creating multiple text fields together to form a table bogs down the system,but why didn't they just *make a table element*? Swing is fine on todays fast machines, but at that crucial time SUN made Swing practically useless for client application development and the ball slipped out of their hands.
They never looked at what the consumers were using or what the consumers wanted. I suspect that this is a legacy of SUN's involvement with the high end server market where they just don't have teams that analyse what the consumers want. MS does or at least seems to do so.
I'm technically comitting a crime?
I meant MS actually.
The question raised by Linux users (why no QT for Linx?) is a good one.
I'm not trolling but perhaps it reflects marketshare and perhaps is a byproduct of the whole OSS movement. The general mindset is that Linux is difficult to use (which is crap but bare with me). Have the OSS crowd ever asked themselves what the platform looks like to an outsider, especially an outsider consumer. Two (2) major rival Desktop systems (KDE and GNOME), no coherent approach to usability and the occaisional need to go and do something on the commandline (I know it has improved but it is still neccessary for some things). I remember even Linus saying last year that it was time the something was done about the usability. Think of how it looks to a potential commercial developer such as Macromedia or Adobe. Which Windowing system do they use, KDE or GNOME? How do they make it completely uniform enough in order to make it worthwhile? This is not a shot at OSS but while OSS software can survive (well sometimes) in an environment like this, commercial stuff like the above can't.
While I think both Desktop systems have their merits, IMO it would be beneficial if they were to merge as I think the fragmentation hurts the platform as a target for commercial software.
This is the thrust of apple's suite. Although it entails the overhead of making a Flash movie for every video you watch online, you suddenly have much more flexibilty in the content and a player that just about everyone has, or will have sooner or later. This means that a major tool of Apple's branding is no longer interesting.
However, Apple is just as dumb as could have been with this whole QT thing. While QT supposedly has the ability to play Flash movies in QT tracks it has never been uptodate with the latest flash version nor has apple ever provided an inhouse tool to produce interactive content (unless this is also the product of some fucked deal between Apple and macromedia). The only company that makes such a tool, Totallyhip (www.totally.com), has been struggling for years to get any marketing presence (who knows it exists?) and, although the tool was far more flexible and powerful than Flash in the beginning, Flash has long since overtaken it.
I blame Apple.
Every interview I read on James Gossling, I read "how people are doing all sorts of exiting things on the desktop with it" and some other stuff such as how it is getting into "the embedded space". (what is embedded space? Did an astronaut get some vacum in abottle and bring it back with him?).
At the same time I read how SUN marvelousy manages to fuck things up with respect to their favourite language on the client side. Granted, it is huge on the e-commerce side of things, but things like JSP are too complex for simple backend applications that are far more easily handled in PHP or ASP. The mobile market seems to like it and it might become big there too, given that ARM and others are making processor core that handle bytecode natively, but that's not yet a given.
What stresses me is that, from the beginning, SUN mishandled Java and played into MS' hands for a number of reasons:
1.When it first came out it became very popular very quickly because of it's ability to provide pixelated aliased dancing Dukes and and sound to web pages. However Sun never bothered to push the point and try to improve performance and load times. People got very tired of seeing pixelated images floating across the screen that took minutes in some cases to load on early modems. They just sat there on their butts and ignored the fact that AWT was hideous, ungainly, and in no way worked very well across platforms (I mean on the Mac or Unix for example) and lacked important controls.
2.One of the things that played into MS' hands was the above and the fact that SUN made Java native interaction very difficult or at least non-trivial to implement, so that people who would have otherwise been able to make GUI controls and interface in C/C++ were put off having to slog through JNI. Along came MS with their JRI (or whatever it was called) which enabled all the hordes of MS developers to easily call MFC and other Win32 stuff directly from the classes. It was an easy picking and whose fault was it. It was or should have been obvious that MS would try to scupper anything that anyone else did (Custom ActiveX never became very popular but it did serve the purpose of making more FUD enter the arena) and the need for easy native access was defintely there. I know that it might have neccesitated changes in the security model but SUN didn't listen or was too confident or just too plain stupid when you look at the ugliness of their desktop for example.
3.Eventually they did listen and came up with Swing, which was so slow on machines of the time (ever run the Swing demo stuff on a 223MHz x86?) that it put off many companies and developers, who just carried on using VB because it was a no contest in terms of GUI response. And this although Swing looked very good.
Why did SUN ignore all the compaints? Why did they make native access so difficult? Why didn't they just improve AWT? Why didn't they try to look at it from a consumer point of view, which is what all those people watching the moronic applets of time were. Applets have all but dissapeared on the web and 99% of interactive shit is done with Flash today. Why didn't they try a trick from the MS book and try to implement things like the JVM starting up on boot or browser launch to make Applets start faster? Why did SUN make such a huge fuss of MS ignoring Java in XP when they couldn't even be bothered to make a marketing push for, IMO, some pretty neat stuff like WebStart?(who actually uses this?)
MS may be an abuse monopoly but SUN has it's head in the clouds up with the bosses of big banks etc and seems too dumb to try to see things from a consumer point of view.
(Sorry for the rant. I think they need it.)
ARM's jazelle core and others (do a google search or go to SUN's website) do this and supposedly it is already being implemented by mobile phone makers.
Just don't link to their site at all. If they want people to not even know that they exist, I would think it's their problem and their bankruptcy.
here
I've come to respect the /. system of open moderation and I ask myself why these trolls are still at 0?
As for *BSD, from what I gather OpenBSD is still the only OS that can claim no remote vulnerabilities with the standard distro over four years. If there was ever a reason to use it as a firewall/gateway/router this should be it. I don't know much about FreeBSD and NetBSD except for Theo de Raadt's rant's about IP, but I like the OpenBSD attitude: They don't seem to see themselves in competition with any OS, they take their time to review the code and release a solid OS. On top of this they have a definite plus in terms of not being developed in the US and therefore not being subject to US export restrictions.
I'm pretty paranoid about most things MS does, perhaps because of their record of back stabbing and this is no exception. In another article on one of MS' VPs in the court talking about how allowing competitors access to the desktop is not in MS' interests because "they might boot Linux" and in conjunction with the article on how MS wants the BIOS to be flashable from Windows itself, I suspect that MS has some trickery up it's sleeve. I really do suspect that MS is planning on releasing a future version of Windows or a SP that will actively prevent you from booting another OS on your PC and I think any "nice talk" from MS with respect to Linux is imply a means to an end.
Although I'm still skeptical about the success of hig tech PDA's in general, this has a couple of things that make it interesting for me:
1.Small size - the Nokias with the folding screen are slightly too big
2.Java - be nice to try out an self written app or two in a language that doesn't cost me the earth.
3.Camera - I think with i-mode now coming out in Europe and in the US as well I presume, the ability to send and receive images will be a hit
4.Colour - Maps, games, etc look better in colour
5.Practical case design
6.Nice OS - not owned by a certain company
I remember back when apple was doing very badly in 1996 there were rumours of an Apple Sony tie up. They are both competeing in the same niche - fancy comsumer high tech goods. Both are very good at what they do. Both are, in an industry that almost completely lack innovation (despite the claims of another certain large company), actually innovative. I sometimes wish that Apple could sometime do a deal with Sony to collaborate in product design and OS. Sadly, of course, this is never going to happen.
They are very good and need to be renewed in about 5 years. I can't lift heavy weights and have to be careful about not being too heavy. They cost about $4500 each and as I'm unemployed right now I don't know how I'm going to pay for the next lot.
This biotechnology crap is a two edged sword. It makes humans less able to adapt to the difficulties of real life, and it is only for the rich, as always.
Dear George and the good ol' boys probably took a look at the Chinese national firewall and thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we could have one of those too? Now, how are we gonna get this past the online-rights crowd?"
Now that they can claim it's all hype they don't have to make secure software anymore.
Ahmen
Here you pay that amount on your computer gear as well. I think it's worth it not to have potentially poisonous PC parts fucking up the environment. On the other hand I've been to a so called recycling place here and basically they just use the stuff for landfill anyway after grinding it up so we're screwed by the politicians yet once again.
If there is any company that is worse in terms of upgrades, stability problems, costs and user support than Quark (including, believe it or not Microsoft) I'ld like to hear it. The other posters here are dead on: The company has raped and abused it's monopoly in Prepress for years and doesn't care the slightest about customer opinion. However, Prepress houses and Printers have not helped at all because if there was ever a conservative, stuck_in_the_mud group of software users it's those people in Prepress. On the one hand they work in an industry that is already entrenched and has a set work flow and extremely tight deadlines to meet (worked there myself) and is thus unwilling to take the risks of trying out new processes that could entail stoppages in the process. On the other hand, this (and I've witnessed this myself) is a group that gets upset because InDesign has different keyboard shortcuts to XPress and then decides that InDesign is "too different" and switches back to XPress.
On top of this most editorial bureaus are stuck with that Pig of a software editorial system: CopyDesk, even though it is typical Quark slow, crashware. Adobe has an answer solution and hopefully this will stimulate the market somewhat.
I have my own beef with Quark as regards the mFactory mTropolis Multimedia Tool that Quark bought up in an attempt to get into that market when their own useless POS, XPress_coupled Immedia didn't get anywhere. They provided no marketing, no support and no development of the tool which then consequently and unsurprisingly didn't expand it's user base. The brilliance of mTropolis can not be overstated in that, even now, 5 years after Quark killed it, there is an *expanding* user group on yahoo groups.
After Quark killed the tool, the user base tried various methods to get the source or at least a development licence from Quark to no avail. Apart from the one million dollar price tag that Quark put on the dead code (which the user group could obviously not afford) they stipulated that "all negative comments pertaining to Quark" must cease before they would think about it because there was such an outcry.
I do *not* wish that company well.
I'm not sure what most European schools use as their OS's but I suppose it would be some version of Windows. Here in Switzerland, although there is a techie elite that is very comfortable with Linux and OSS, it's the case that most people and companies are MS users and have this unfounded feeling that it is the "superior" solution and scoff at suggestions that OSS will bring them anything. the thing is that Switzerland is on the whole a very rich country where the average wage is about $3500/month for the whole country and so most customers (as well as schools) are not inconvenienced by high MS software licences. MS spends a lot of propaganda PR money here to make sure that it stays that way (Product rollouts TV adds etc). The only change that I have noticed is that almost all ISP's now use Linux and the two leading Tech Universities in Zürich and Lausanne have stopped their creep to Windows and have started moving back to a majority of Unix systems, since this is where the most room for development and experimentation is.
This will probably have an impact on the market sooner or later as most job ads for developers, managers etc require that the students graduated at one of these two Unis.
At the risk of being redundant I'll say this is a very good posting. I've also done tech support on the telephone (In no less than three languages) and the amount of people using computers who have absolutely no idea of what they are is amazing. Doing windows support was the worst for me because of the differences in Windows versions meaning that one has to first figure out what they are using and then *where* the various control dialogues are etc. Mac support has been the easiest both in OSX and Classic OS. What I did find interesting is that doing Linux support (although I am far from a guru in the OS) was easier than I expected. I was doing support for a guy running Linux on a cobalt RaQ and the great thing about Linux is that you can do most of the support through the command line once you get the guy to find the terminal (this is a similar process to windows i.e. "What's a terminal/console/taskbar etc") But once you're there you can do almost everything by simply asking the person to type in commands and read out the answers to you, which saves you a lot of hassle trying to figure out in which dialogue or control panel the user has just got lost in.
Of course if they ask "What's a keyboard?" then you have some more work cut out for you.